BOOKS

The Shadow of an Epic

BY JOHN WAIN HERE is a new instalment of Ezra Pound's Cantos bringing the total up to 109.* The Cantos are sometimes declared to be unreadable, but I do not think this is so. They are very easy to read, surely, as long as you adopt the proper technique. Most poetry demands a slow and careful approach, with the reader's mind at a high pitch of concentration; in fact, the commonest fault among readers of poetry is failure to concentrate hard enough, so that there is always a pact between the bad poet and the lazy reader. (Poetry-and-jazz, for instance, is largely a device for protecting ersatz verse from close attention.) But in the Cantos Pound has produced something unique: verse which doesn't need—is actually better without—close attention, and yet is anything but perfunctory or spurious.

Nothing is simpler than to read the Cantos in such a way as to enjoy and admire them. You settle down by the fireside, make sure you are quite comfortable, and then go into a trance with the book open before you. Don't skip—that is the prime rule; your eyes must travel over every line that is on the page, including the ideograms. If, in this fashion, you sit there until the whole book has been read, you will find, when the last page is turned, that the experience was meaningful and even moving. It is merely that close concentration destroys the effect. The usual way of reading the Cantos is to open the book warily and leaf through it in search of 'good bits.' This, as C. S. Lewis insisted in his book on Milton, is always a mistake in reading long poems, whose effects may take pages to develop and which cannot afford to pro- vide quotable little gems to snag the reader's attention. The long poem is never meant to be read at the same high pressure of attention as the short lyric. Traditionally, epic poets made use of stock phrases, invariable epithets, and other devices for allowing the reader or hearer to slacken off and so stay awake to the end. Modern poetry cannot afford these devices because one of its first principles is that language must be fresh and natural-sounding; however elliptical, it must have the ring of living speech—`the rest is litera- ture,' and 'literature' is not a polite word. Stock phrases, recurrent adjectives, and the rest, are `literature.' When they go out, we are face to face with Poe's declaration that the long poem is a contradiction in terms.

Ezra Pound has always been interested in the possibility of a modern epic poem, and it is typical of the man that he has devoted yeirs of single- minded effort to the task of forming a modern epic style. To call the Cantos a long pbem is per- haps stretching the word 'poem' slightly, for of course a good deal of the Cantos, as one leafs through them page by page, consists of notebook jottings and other material which bears no rela- tionship to verse, epic or otherwise. Still, the dominant impression of the Cantos is majestic; the mind one feels behind it is a poetic mind, able to send gleams of imagination, or sudden piercing jabs of poignancy, darting through the mass of

* TI1RONES : Gwros 96-109. By Ezra Pound. (Faber, l8s.)

untreated material at any moment, and able to give us, when the strategy of the poem calls for it, sustained passages of high rhetoric.

I intend, therefore, no disrespect to the Cantos or their author when I say that the best state to get into before reading them is a state of trance. If one simply goes ahead, understanding perhaps one line in ten (in the clearer passages, this can rise as high as two lines in three), and letting the suc- cession of thoughts and images flow into one's mind, the thing works. It is like listening through the keyhole to some grand old scholar, working on a vast theory of history, muttering to himself as he moves about his study, trying to put his hand on the right book, repeating dates and quotations to himself, suddenly bursting into oratory as he curses one character in the story or blesses another.

& melted down the church vessels & coined them vopfcrperrct xai pi? p:plata

(which is not in Liddell D.D.), The Deacon, col. 1026, thinks it `argenteos,' nummos aureos et argenteos, HERACLIUS versus Chosdroes coined candlesticks to keep off Chosdroes Eltawor Justinian 527 Tiberius Justin Mauricius 577 Phocas Heraclius, six oh two, all dates approximate, Deutschland unter Dulles, USA, slightly nostalgic by the boat-bridge over Euphrates.

This kind of thing is not new in literature : one gets much the same effect from Sir Thomas Browne.

. . . Much less whether the house of Diogenes were a Tub framed of wood, and after the man-

ner of ours, or rather made of earth, as learned

men conceive, and so more clearly make out that expression of Juvenal. We should be too critical

to question the letter Y, or bicornous element of Pythagoras, that is, the making of the horns equal : or the left less than the right, and so destroying the Symbolic intent of the figure; con- founding the narrow line of virtue, with the larger road of vice; answerable unto the narrow

door of heaven, and the ample gates of hell, expressed by our Saviour, and not forgotten by Homer, in that Epithete of Pluto's house.

It is true that Browne makes it easier for the reader than Pound, by accompanying the text with a ribbon of footnotes in which such things as 'that expression of Juvenal' and 'that Epithete of Pluto's house' are quoted. But this is no great difference; Browne's notebook is in better order, perhaps.

Browne, of course, is a late Renaissance figure, a last inheritor of the glorious old rag-bag tradi- tion. Pound, like Joyce, is deeply attracted to this tradition and may be said to have revived it; cer- tainly, Joyce and Pound between them have made it much easier to write the kind of rambling, un- classifiable pantechnicon of a book, dominated by a central idea but free to embellish, meander, make raids on neighbouring territory, at the writer's whim. (The line would go on through

mid : but are there any younger writers joirlill! in?. I can't think of any, though Norman Mailer; new book, not yet published here, sounds like candidate.) Browne's work isn't `poetry,' but could be said of him, as of Rabelais, that it 6'0, tains much that is nearer to poetry, accorded to our modern ideas, than to prose. I would say' O same of the Canotos; if this makes them tbe°,11,h, interesting long poem of our time, as Mr. thinks, then one of the conclusions to be is that Poe was right.

There is one other point about the Cantos

we cannot, if we are to be honest, shrink frr", making. Pound was confined for a number 6 years in an insane asylum, having been four1: unfit to plead his own cause when charged 0', treason to his country. During those years, as all know, it was a widespread belief in Eur6'1, that Pound was not mad at all, but was Mere being kept in custody for political reasons thought so myself, until I visited him in ci Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, DC, in Augtlor 1957. That visit left me with an impression Pound's grandeur and dignity, but also, inese3C; ably, of his mental derangement. As he sat it deckchair on the lawn, shirtless, revealing tht muscular upper torso of a man twenty years b, junior, and with his strange, sad little band disciples listening carefully to every word, 1 fell ; like Edgar in the presence of Lear. 'Conversatir)''j in the ordinary sense, was not possible; l'ocTib P, talked on and on, in connected sentences and sy'„' perfect logic and persuasiveness; but if an; interrupted him with a question it simply threl the needle out of the groove, and he fell silent for moment, passed his hand wearily over his eYr, and then went on talking, starting from a differed point, as if the needle had been dropped back.," random. He seemed unconscious of the quest's except as an interruption.

This bears on the Cantos to some extent, t4,; cause there can be no denying that they do shci, signs of paranoia and monomania; their &au) grandeur is very far from ordinary reasonah.lei ness, and if anyone wanted to call them 'mad would not, argue with him. The real mistake. ,1 my opinion, is made by those critics who -.e1 l, the Cantos as a logical, lucid, carefully work out problem in literary engineering. Years ag'i. Pound was in the habit of saying (he said tt,:, Yeats, for instance) that when the hundred Canto was published, the whole work would tt seen to have a unity like that of a Bach furje And if he had indeed stopped at No. 100, Tribe of Ezra would have got to work and just fled the structure as a whole. But surely ear they are disconcerted by the sight of the Mast blandly sailing on past the hundred mark? prefer, myself, to sacrifice the cloak of rationali• if the Cantos are 'mad,' fixated, obsessive, the are also magnificent and of a sombre fascinat.,i°,

For these reasons I cannot agree with Mr Robert Graves when he writes :

It is an extraordinary paradox that Pouudt sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, s dom metrical Cantos, embellished with esotemd Chinese ideographs—for all I know, they TO have been traced from the nearest tea-chest and with illiterate Greek, Latin, Spanish an, Provencal snippets . . . are now compulsou reading in many ancient centres of learning.

One of the things those 'centres of learning' Me

profitably do for us is to study the differea between the early, middle and late Cantos. new ones have fewer lyrical passages and doodling, and to that extent strike me as a WW1; off. But for a riper judgment, balancing the 07 against the familiar, we shall need more time.